


The Count

by petals42_tumblr (rosepetals42)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Suicide but not really because they are immortal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25609789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosepetals42/pseuds/petals42_tumblr
Summary: After learning that they will die eventually,  Joe and Nicky establish a tradition. They make sure they die the same amount of times.(headcanon turned fic)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 27
Kudos: 568





	The Count

**Author's Note:**

> This started as what was supposed to be a quick tumblr post and turned in fic legit enough to post here. Hope you enjoy it!

After learning that they will die eventually, Joe and Nicky establish a tradition. They make sure they die the same amount of times. 

Sometimes this means one literally _throwing_ himself in front of the other so that they take the bullet and feel the death. Sometimes it means purposefully lowering your weapon at a certain time. It always means keeping count of how many times you die. And how many times the other person dies. And comparing afterwards.

Sometimes they check in mid-battle, mid-situation; more often they wait until after. After the blood and the extraction and it’s usually when they are home and they aren’t embarrassed of it, not really, this obsessive counting and matching, but usually, usually, they wait until it is just the two of them again. Until they are somewhere soft and quiet and--

_“Six,” Nicky says as he reaches under the hem of Joe’s shirt to help him pull it off. The action isn’t a prelude to anything, they are too tired for that, it’s just that Joe had been stabbed in the shoulder and though the wound isn’t there, even after a thousand years, Nicky still assumes that sometimes Joe must be sore from the injury._

_It’s not a prelude, but he drops a kiss close to where he thinks the wound was anyway._

_“Seven,” Joe replies, more a grunt than anything as he reaches for Nicky’s belt. Their clothes are clean, it’s been days since the raid, but it will be nice to get out of them anyway._

_Nicky sighs to himself, more in annoyance than anything else. The sheets are clean and the floor is carpet; they’ll have to do this in the bathroom. And the bathroom is one of those modern all-white things and he’s not sure they have bleach on hand. If only pills and poison didn’t take so long and hurt so much._

_“We could--” And there’s a hesitation that means Joe is going to argue against it; as he does sometimes. Only when it’s Nicky’s turn, of course; but Nicky shoots him a glare. They’ve had this argument before. He’s not having it again. Joe’s throat clicks as he swallows one word and spits out another “--go outside. Less clean up.”_

_“Then we’d have to put clothes on again,” Nicky replies. “And someone might see.” He steps out of his pants on the way, grabbing Joe’s gun from the bedside table. He moves quickly. He wants to get to bed._

_He settles in the tub and blinks when Joe follows him. Then smiles. It’s something he loves about Joe; that he can still never quite tell when Joe is going to let Nicky handle it himself and when he is going to come watch him. It seems to be a 50-50 shot. Sometimes Joe can’t do it, can’t make himself hurt Nicky again, will only burst in after he hears the gunshot, while other times--_

_“I love you,” Joe says softly, taking the gun, and it’s in a language Nicky doesn’t need to identify because he knows those words in all of them. And then he’s lowering his head for a kiss and Nicky raises his chin and--_

_The shot hits him in the heart but he doesn’t feel the pain. Or if he does, he doesn’t remember._

_What he remembers is Joe already wiping the blood from his chest with a warm towel as he wakes._

Usually they do it when they’re alone. It’s not peaceful, but it’s calm and they clean up and run hands over blessedly unbroken skin and hold each other and it’s superstitious and illogical and maybe it’s not even safe but it’s… it’s better than the alternative. 

Of course, now with Nile around and Andy… _Andy_ again, they are a team like they haven’t been for decades. There’s less and less splitting up after missions, more and more time spent sharing rooms or apartments and it’s not a _secret_ , this thing they do, but it is private. 

Until it isn’t.

_It had been a hard mission. Hard because innocent people died and hard because even the people they were fighting against didn’t seem evil, because the desperation in their eyes was obvious and it was the right thing to do, maybe, but it felt hard. And it was hard because it was long. The intel they had wasn’t perfect and all four of them had died twice before even breaching the compound and Nicky had gotten cut off somehow and pinned down for almost twenty minutes before managing to fight his way out and even Andy had looked tired of it all before the end. It was a firefight that felt more like a battle, seventy two hours getting in, almost as many getting out and--_

_It was just hard. Nile let the others set up camp, opting to dig the latrine and daydreamed about getting back to some form of civilization where there was running water and a shower. Andy said she could have someone out to pick them up by tomorrow or the next day at the latest but Nile knows that just means more bumpy travel for a few hours. Or longer depending on who Andy gets to come out here._

_She steps back towards the fire and sees that everyone must be feeling the same as her. Andy is half-heartedly chewing a granola bar, looking as if each bite has to be forced down, and Nicky is already asleep, passed out facing away from the fire so that Joe’s back will be warmed when he inevitably curls around him. Only Joe is still moving, adding to the pile of wood near the fire so it will be easy to keep going in the night and then opening a duffel to grab a blanket to drape over Nicky and then digging through another duffel to grab something else that he stuffs into the waistband of his pants and Nile has just enough time to assume to herself that it must be some sort of food before she is flopping into her own sleeping bag, eyes already sliding closed._

_She sits up only to move a rock out from under her back and opens her mouth only to say goodnight._

_That’s when she sees Joe lean down to press a kiss to Nicky’s temple, but instead of laying down next to him, he is rising and moving away from camp, away from the latrine, and she opens her mouth to tell him he’s going the wrong way._

_“Let him go,” Andy says quietly. “He’ll be fine.”_

_Nile frowns at her, but her brain is a bit too fuzzy for questions. She mentally shrugs and curls up._

_And shoots up as she hears the unmistakable sound of a gunshot nearby. Muffled by a silencer, obviously, faint enough that Nicky doesn’t stir, but it sounds like it came from the direction that_ Joe just went _and she flings her arm out next to her to find her gun. Andy will be silently kicking Nicky awake and they’ll regret it, whichever idiot who managed to survive the compound and follow them here._

_“Hey.” Andy’s whisper cuts through her panic nicely. Nile turns, ready to follow Andy’s lead. “Hey, it’s okay.” She is still sitting. She has not reached for a weapon. She is not waking up Nicky._

_“What?” Nile says, keeping her voice low only so they don’t give away their position. “Andy that was a--”_

_“A gun, I know,” Andy says with a wry twist of her mouth. “It’s okay. No one’s coming to hurt us.”_

_“Joe’s out there!” Nile says, fighting to keep her voice low. Out there and if he’s shooting at something, that must mean-- “We have to go help him!”_

_“He’s not in danger,” Andy says. Nile tries not to sputter at her. Obviously he’s not in_ danger _, he’s freaking_ immortal _, they all are, but that doesn’t mean they should just let him fight this battle alone. That’s not how--_

_Another shot has her kicking her feet out from her sleeping bag. This one is even fainter as if Joe is moving away from them. Enough is enough. She doesn’t know what Andy is playing at but this is ridiculous._

_“Don’t,” Andy says sharply and then sighs. “He’s-- they-- him and Nicky, they-- They have this thing.”_

_Nile stops moving. If only because Andy sounds the particular brand of annoyed and exhausted and regretful that means she is about to actually give up a secret._

_“What?” Nile says when Andy’s silence lengthens._

_“They try to stay even,” Andy finally replies. She looks at Nile as if Nile is supposed to know what that means. Nile’s face must ask the question for her. “With their… deaths. They try to make sure they have the same number so that if…”_

_She fades out. Nile’s brain finally catches on. So that if their final death is no more than a numbers game, they will be together._

_“That’s…” Nile doesn’t realize she starts the sentence aloud and then doesn’t know how to finish it. Insane? Stupid? Romantic? Not how that works? How does she know how any of it works anyway, maybe that is how it works, maybe it is just some number that you hit and-- but, fuck, what if it’s not a number and it’s just random and Joe_ kills _himself out there._

_“It’s what they do,” Andy says. Only the tightness around her eyes reveals her true feelings. “They won’t stop.”_

_Nile blinks. It… she… Nicky had been pinned down today for almost twenty minutes. Who knows…_

_Another shot rings through the clearing._

_Nile flinches._

_“Go to sleep,” Andy tells her. “I’ll stay up.”_

_It’s an order and Nile lays back down for lack of anything better to do._

_But she doesn’t fall asleep. She lies awake and she waits and counts as eight gunshots crack through the night._

Nicky is furious the next day. More angry than Nile’s ever seen him and Andy says nothing, but she gives the two men a wide berth, sending first herself ahead as a scout and than Nile head as a second scout and--

_“That’s not how we do things,” Nicky hisses as both women fade into the trees. He comes to a stop and turns to face Joe fully for the first time since this morning. Since he had woken to see the silencer still attached to Joe’s gun and felt the tacky blood still plastered to the back of his head and realized what Joe had done last night. “How could you--”_

_He looks away from Joe then. Looks away and unbidden, his mind plays it out. If Joe had permanently died and Nicky wasn’t there. He would’ve woken up alone, back cold despite the fire, and no one would have known where to look at first, but they would have followed his tracks easily enough and he would have run only to see Joe’s body, already cold and damaged and--_

_He shudders. And then flinches as Joe’s hand reaches for his face._

_For the first time in many years, Nicky slaps it away._

_“I can’t believe you would do that to me,” he says and his eyes are filled with tears that he tries to stop from falling. It would be one thing for it to happen in battle, another if this theory of theirs was wrong, if it resulted in something horrific, but to_ not be there _._

_To not be there would be worse than death itself._

_And Joe knows that. And the fact that he still-- he still-- Nicky doesn’t know what his face does. Doesn’t know how to continue._

_“That is not how we do this.”_

_“I know,” Joe says. “I know, Nicky, I’m so-- I’m sorry. I just--”_

_He takes a breath then and it’s his turn to glance away. “You were gone so long where I couldn’t see you. And I couldn’t get to you. And I--”_

_His throat closes and Nicky opens his mouth to tell Joe that that is_ exactly _what Joe had done to him, worse because he was not in battle, he was sleeping and unaware, but Joe looks back at him in that moment and his eyes are red and his voice is raw and desperate._

_“I had to know the count was right, Nicolo.” It’s their old blench of Italian and Arabic; the language they created together at the beginning. “I had to make them match before I could sleep in case we were attacked in the night or something in you was still healing. Or not healing. You fell asleep so fast, and so easily, and you had been gone so long that I- I-”_

_He stops that and his hand makes an aborted motion towards Nicky’s face again before dropping to his side. “I’m sorry, my love. Truely.”_

_His eyes flick to the ground and then to Nicky’s face and Nicky is angry enough still to make him wait for one heartbeat, two, and then--_

_He grabs Joe’s face with both his hands, a touch too firmly to be called gentle._

_“Never again, Yusuf.” Joe’s hands lift to curl around Nicky’s wrists and press them more firmly together. “You will not do that to me again.”_

_“I-” Joe starts and maybe he was going to say “I won’t” or maybe “I promise” or maybe the sound wasn’t I- at all but Nicky doesn’t give him the chance. He presses their mouths together and pours his anger into that, and his hurt too and desperation and fear and love and he knows Joe won’t do it again. Knows because Joe is kissing him the same way._

_His left hand drops to Joe’s shoulders to pull him closer, ever closer, and his right trails to where he can feel the blood on the back of Joe’s head and it’s blood, but it’s dried, dried and the skull is whole and they are both wonderfully, wonderfully alive and for now, that is enough._

They will handle the rest of it together. 

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed!


End file.
